The first part of my paper addresses the impact of what may be called an "attention deficit" in terms of the cognition of the historical art and architecture of the Balkan region internationally. This I see, at least in part, as a legacy of how art history was written both in the region and abroad. The second part of my paper addresses the absence of art and visual culture more generally in historical training and practice, questioning the implicit postulation that the visual – be it as art, material culture, or pictorial evidence – was of little concern to the historian, whose prime directive is the analysis of written sources. This, I argue, would not only be an unnecessary self-limitation of one’s evidence to the textual; it also ignores the function of images as factors in the social production of history. I also point to an impact of the neglect of art beyond the academia: as art produced in the past serves to advertise the position of cultures and societies vis-à-vis others and the world, the fact that the Balkans are virtually invisible in the art-historical discourse only reinforces the cliché of a region peopled by societies passionate only about argument.